Dealing With Infidelity: Can Counseling Help?

Often times, when facing infidelity in your marriage whether you were the one who was unfaithful or your spouse, you probably have many moments of feeling that the marriage cannot progress. This, however, is not always the case. One step to consider taking is counseling, which, yes, can actually help in these cases, even if it ultimately leads to simply learning how to cope with the situation and possible split.

One of the major reasons infidelity counseling can help is that it provides a healthy space to talk it out. Most often, when a spouse has been unfaithful, they will blame it on the spouse who was not. This can be done by placing blame on not being emotionally available, for example, so they found this in someone else. Whatever the case, infidelity counseling is going to lead the conversation away from going there. Instead, the idea is to get to the root of the actual reasons for infidelity without placing blame. Once the root is found, then open discussion for making changes in the relationship can be much easier because the other spouse is not made to feel that they are the only problem.

Another step in the process of infidelity counseling that helps is opening the discussion to honest details. The spouse who was unfaithful must be open to answering their spouse’s questions about the situation. When in a healthy environment this is much easier because the spouse won’t feel that they need to keep quiet in order to move the past behind them. What is not realized in this case is that the hurt spouse can often feel more hurt when the details are kept a complete secret from them.

What you must remember too is that infidelity counseling is on the side of making the marriage move forward. With this goal, it’s more likely for the marriage to be repaired in a healthy and healing way, rather than a damaging one caused from infidelity, placing blame, and secrets.

If you and your spouse are dealing with this, we are here to help guide the marriage back to a healthy state. Contact us today at Stonebriar Counseling Associates for more details.